Interview Shaun Paul, head ice cream maker for Bobtail and guitarist for Chaperone

As the driving force behind lo-fi locals Chaperone, Shaun Paul is into pastel soundscapes, hand claps, and sing-along harmonies. The band’s about to release its first E.P., Cripple King, and is celebrating with a show at Subterranean this Thursday.

Even outside of Chaperone, though, Paul lives a sweet, sweet life: He’s the head ice cream maker for Bobtail, the local handmade scoops chain. Before the CD release show and before it gets too cold for frozen treats, Paul dropped some sweet science on The A.V. Club.

The A.V. Club: What’s your actual job at Bobtail?

Shaun Paul: During the summer, I run the team that makes all the ice cream for Bobtail’s three stores, as well as what we sell wholesale. I make a good majority of that ice cream myself, by the way. In the winter and fall, I make all of the ice cream, and come up with the flavors.

Right now, we’re celebrating Octoberfest, so I get to think up a beer flavor each week. This week it’s Old Engine Oil Black Ale, which is almost a stout, but not quite. I put some chocolate in the ice cream to bring out the maltiness of it.

AVC: How do you come up with flavors?

SP: I just wander around Whole Foods or our ingredient aisle, and decide what to make.

AVC: How much do you actually have to make?

SP: In the summer, 140 buckets a day. Each bucket is 1.5 gallons. In the fall, it slows down a little, so we’re doing 80 buckets every other day.

AVC: How did you get your sweet gig?

SP: I used to work at a kennel, so it was a natural progression. No, no. Bobtail hired me four years ago to be their delivery driver. I knew the city really well from my doggy daycare job, and I knew how to drive large vehicles. The summer I got hired, the production manager quit, and I got moved up, and I just sort of fell in love with the job.

AVC: Did you love making ice cream before you got the job?

SP: No, working here has made me more passionate about making flavors, and seeing what goes well together. In winter and fall, when it’s slower, I can put more thought into things and focus on flavors. In the summer, we have to lay everything out beforehand, but in the winter, I can, like, bake my own cookies and put them into ice cream. I can make my own cake and mix it in.

All of our ice cream is as homemade as you can imagine it being. We stir everything in by hand—nuts, Oreos, sprinkles—every single bucket is touched, and it’s all made out of our Broadway store. In the summer, we run the ice cream machines 12 hours a day.

AVC: What are the best and worst flavors you’ve ever come up with?

SP: [The best] was called Crunchy Tiger, and it was a butter pecan base with Oreos and chocolate-covered toffee in it. The worst was really, really not good. I tried to make mojito ice cream with a rum flavoring and bits of mint, and it was just not good at all. The mint was alright, but the rum flavor was just sickly sweet.

Generally, if I make something that’s not good, I don’t admit it, though. I tell the people I work with that they just don’t have taste buds as sophisticated as mine, that they’re just not developed enough.

AVC: You met some of Chaperone’s other members working at Bobtail, right?

SP: Miles, our bass player, was working at the Southport store, when we had one. When I was out delivering, I’d take a cigarette break with him, and I knew he played bass. He used to jam with my old band, and we just ended up being great friends. We’ve kept our musical partnership going until now.

Mark, our second guitar and keys player, I hired last year to make ice cream as part of my production team. It’s kind of the same deal as what happened with Miles—I thought he was pretty cool, but he had his own thing going on. Last Thanksgiving, we both had no family in town, and I had a bottle of absinthe and a mandolin, so I invited him over. We played “Stairway” and a lot of other Zeppelin on that mandolin and my guitar.

AVC: I heard you use Bobtail’s van for your Chaperone gigs?

SP: It’s Chaperone’s van, technically. They rent it from us every month to do all the deliveries and stuff like that. They’ve been really great about it. Like earlier this year we needed a new transmission, and they paid for it out of future rent. That was nice, because it was a $2000 job, and we’re a working band who doesn’t have that money, really.

The company’s just really supportive of Chaperone. They know when summer rolls around, I’ll give more to them than I give to the band, and that in fall and winter it will be the opposite. I can take weekends off in the off-season for a quick jaunt or mini-tour. Bobtail’s just a company that wants everyone to be doing what makes them happy, and that’s very supportive.

AVC: Do you write songs at work?

SP: 80% of the songs are written while driving the van. I’d say 20% are written in the shower or while walking my dog. When I’m driving around delivering ice cream, I just turn the music off and hum to myself and come up with words.

AVC: On the Cripple King E.P., the songs are pretty lo-fi. Your press materials say you used things like space heaters for percussion. What made you want work that way?

SP: Mostly, we did it that way because we couldn’t afford anything better. We just used what was available to us, and that meant we recorded in kitchens, hallways, a hippie commune, a loft, or whatever. It was just timing. Like, “this person’s available right now. Let’s go record their part.” We could do that, though, because the whole record was made on my computer.

Tom, our drummer, is a very serious Broken Social Scene fan by all definitions. The more stuff that we would let him put on the record, the happier he was. So, he was using that space heater as high-end percussion on our song, “Thomas!”—but it was just too high-end. Instead of making him take it out, though, we just hit it with a book, and that put the sound more on the low-end side of things. It just came out a little more enjoyable, a little more pleasant.